Articles

Gamescom 2011: Valve's Gabe Newell Sounds Off on DOTA 2

We talk to Valve's overlord about the future of the celebrated Warcraft III mod.

By the time this article is published, most of us will have probably seen at least one DOTA 2-related video. We will have speculated about the future of the team-based competitive strategy franchise, bemoaned the makeovers our favorite heroes have received, or popped champagne because of them. Burning questions will have arose -- questions that demand immediate answers. What does this mean for the original Defense of the Ancients? Will original DOTA developer IceFrog abdicate the throne? Will Americans and Asians be able to go head-to-head? How exactly does the game play? And, most importantly, will DOTA 2 have hats?

I had the opportunity to get all but one of these questions answered during the first day of Gamescom 2011. Sadly, it was the one that I wanted an answer to most. "Sorry, it's all about the tournament this Gamescom. We don't have a playable version [on the show floor]," Valve Software's public relations manager Doug Lombardi said when I accosted him for a hands-on demo.

On the bright side, I got the opportunity to talk with Gabe Newell, co-founder, Managing Director and all-around head honcho of Valve. "Several of the employees at Valve are hardcore DOTA players," Newell told me, as went into DOTA 2's development history. "The way we got started on DOTA 2 was, a group of people at Valve are huge fans. They started talking to IceFrog. [He told] us about what he wanted to do in the sequel, and what he would like to do if he didn't have the constraints he had been operating under. So, [Valve employee] Robin [Walker] went, 'Let's work together on this!' and they convinced him to come work under Valve."

"[Our guys] did a prototype in a week to prove that we could do that sort of thing in the Source Engine. Then, they started convincing other people at Valve to work on the project. It wasn't hard, given that there's a bunch of DOTA fans at the office."

Newell was somewhat dismissive in regard to the DOTA copyright issue that had cropped up earlier this year. "These kind of issues are always around, [so] I don't pay a lot of attention to them," he said. In addition, Newell explained that this was the "fourth or fifth' iteration of the product. "One of the most important issues is making more of the game possible. IceFrog has continued to do what he has done, and that is to evolve the gameplay. We'll continue doing this after we ship -- adding more heroes, more capabilities, removing exploits, adding more capabilities for highly skilled players to take advantage of."

Unsurprisingly, when questioned about what precisely those abilities were, Newell was quick to inform me that Valve wasn't prepared to divulge that information yet. Nonetheless, he clarified that 105 heroes will be playable at launch. "Of course, there will be more forthcoming," he added. It also looks as though DOTA 2 will be far more accessible, compared to the original. For one thing, DOTA 2 will have hero-specific and non-hero-specific key bindings. "You can bind the 'deny' action to a key if you want," Newell pointed out.

And for those without state-of-the-art computers, Newell had more good news: "One of the greater challenges was making sure that we could support a wide range of PCs and such. [While] we want to make sure it looks great, we want to make sure that all the people playing DOTA can play DOTA 2."

Given that we were talking about accessibility, I had a couple more important questions: How much will DOTA 2 cost? And will it utilize a free-to-play model like chief competitors League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth? "We haven't actually decided on a payment model yet," Newell explained. "The Team Fortress 2 [free-to-play] experiment worked out better than we expected. We're way more worried about making the original community happy. It's hard enough to make a good one; we'll worry about how it gets monetized later."

Newell also touched on software piracy. "We almost never worry about it. We're more worried about offering value to our customers. In the areas where piracy is an issue, we've discovered it's because they're often an under-served audience. For example, Russia was supposed to be a waste of time because everyone knows the Russians pirate. But, the moment we started providing translations and made things available at the same time English version is, we discovered that Russians no more likely to pirate than Americans are."

Finally, I inquired about the original DOTA's future. Does this spell the end of the classic Warcraft III mod, and is IceFrog contractually bound to stop working on it? "We don't have contracts with anyone at the company. So, I'm not sure how IceFrog could be under contract," Newell told me. "But I think he intends to continue supporting it. The problem is that there are things he can do in DOTA 2 that he cannot do in the existing model."

"We'll find ways to extend the [franchise]," Newell elaborated. "If you ask me, maps are probably one of the easier ways to create value. But, other people have thought otherwise. We've actually created multiple maps internally but, we'll see. I feel that one of the most valuable things are the heroes. Also, I think we should see what we can do with game modes. This hasn't been so successful in the past, as the community has a tendency to narrowly focus on certain things -- but the great thing is, once you start trying things, you can start seeing what's good and what's not."